Bill Maher was very sharp this week in pointing out that, along with climate change — which, as we on the east coast know, is not a problem worth worrying about, at least not if you don't mind having halibut as roommates for a while — the most important issue that went unmentioned in the four debates among the members of the two major-party tickets was the country's increasingly stupid "war" on drugs. Particularly stupid, of course, is the "war" on marijuana, which is perhaps the most wasteful use of the public fisc since the last time Strom Thurmond drew a paycheck. But, not only has the "war" on drugs been a waste of money, and a deformative nightmare on our criminal justice system, it's also gone a long way towards acclimating an allegedly free people to life under a surveillance state.

Our latest chapter comes from Wisconsin, where a federal judge ruled that, under certain circumstances, surveillance cameras can be placed on private property without a warrant. It should surprise approximately nobody that the DEA was behind this scheme, and that the malefactors under surveillance were growing pot. The two men now face a possibility of life in prison and $10 million in fines. (The sentences, of course, are nutty enough.) I realize that the Supreme Court has been trying — and generally failing — to create some kind of limits here. (Note the Jesuitical hair-splitting about what "curtilage" entails in this case.) But, to me, this is a chilling example of technology running away with the law, and it seems to me that, in a country that still ostensibly has a Bill of Rights that, in any dispute arising from a conflict between technology and civil liberties, the benefit of the doubt should in all cases be given to the latter....

"Placing a video camera in a location that allows law enforcement to record activities outside of a home and beyond protected curtilage does not violate the Fourth Amendment," Justice Department prosecutors James Santelle and William Lipscomb told Callahan. As digital sensors become cheaper and wireless connections become more powerful, the Justice Department's argument would allow police to install cameras on private property without court oversight — subject only to budgetary limits and political pressure.

Lovely. Because of our "war" on drugs, the Fourth Amendment now stops not only at the schoolhouse door — America's schoolchildren can be drug-tested for any reason for the privilege of learning what a free nation it is in which they live — but also at the limits of what the court determines your "home" to be. And, generally, folks are all right with this, because it has not made the slightest dent in our politics. Spookified, is what we are.